Thames Valley Housing has escaped the restrictions of its legacy infrastructure with a new nine-site network from Exponential-e. The virtual private LAN service (VPLS) has removed TVH’s previous bandwidth restrictions and provides more support for large business applications. Exponential-e’s new network also covered the temporary relocation of TVH’s headquarters for a year during refurbishments.
Gerard Brown, ICT infrastructure manager, Thames Valley Housing, said, “We had reached the point where we had to restrict traffic at various times of the day. But this still wasn’t enough with all our remote offices coming in on one connection with very limited bandwidth.”
TVH’s tender requirements for the new network included the ability to support a wide range of large business applications and the flexibility to cater for the temporary relocation of its headquarters.
Exponential-e was selected to design and deploy a new fully-converged network for TVH. A nine-site wide area network over Exponential-e’s Layer 2 VPLS network was designed to connect TVH’s headquarters in Twickenham to three office sites and four remote sites as well as its temporary office during the refurbishments.
Brown said, “Our current network wasn’t up to the job or flexible enough to allow us to move with it. Extending it would have been very expensive as we would have had to add a lot of extra components. Exponential-e has taken VPLS technology that bit further, making our whole network feel like one big network, effectively making our remote sites appear as if they are part of the same building.”
The new network now supports VoIP telephony, Civica’s Universal Housing system and a Citrix remote access suite. Exponential-e’s protocol-neutral network design will also accommodate the future addition of further large applications and changes in network bandwidth demands.
TVH reports that it now has a state-of-the-art network covering a much wider area and with increased capacity. With connections across all nine sites and improved overall connectivity, employees are more productive and tenant services have improved.
Brown said, “Even though we had to break out of an existing contract early and pay a penalty fee in order to implement the new network with Exponential-e, changing network supplier still worked out more cost-effective. In addition, we can now run multiple services across our network, which allows shared services between departments, making our assets go even further.”
